jeffcraven.com: Linksys NSLU2

Tuesday - February 1, 2005

Linksys NSLU2

I've had a Linksys NSLU2 laying around the house for several months. Basically it allows you to plug in a USB hard drive, and it shares it out over the network. It also has some really cool hacking potential since it runs an embedded version of Linux.

Over the weekend, I decided I wanted to get rid of my old Linux box, and set this box up in it's place. I bought an external enclosure (Coolmax CD-310-U2) and dropped in an unused 30GB hard drive I had in the closet. The standard setup worked great. It formatted the drive, and my Mac and PC had no issues reading/writing files via SMB.

Easy enough, so I decided to try out some of the hacks for it. Most of the information came from the NSLU2 Linux page located here. I installed the Unslung 3.17 beta software successfully. After that was up and running, I installed some basic packages including OpenSSH, bash, sudo, lsof, and vsftpd. A full list of available packages can be found here.

To do list:
1) Get passive FTP working properly
2) Install iTunes server and possibly TiVo HMO server.

All in all, a pretty interesting diversion for a couple hours.

Posted by jcraven at February 1, 2005 11:29 AM